Ongoing Challenges in Language Assessment

Abstract

Many challenges that language testers have faced over the years continue to engage us. New challenges engendered by changes in the economic, social, and educational contexts of the 21st century assure that the field will be vibrant and exciting. Continuing issues include the validity of interpretations, ethics and professionalism, the use of language assessments in accountability decisions, and washback. New challenges include classroom language assessment, training classroom teachers in language assessment, and language assessment for citizenship and naturalization. The needs for language assessments have increased and there is greater demand for language testers to be accountable to stakeholders.Assessment justificationis the process of providing a rationale and evidence to justify the use of a particular assessment. An assessment use argument (AUA) provides a conceptual framework for linking assessment performance to assessment use. Assessment justification is applicable to the wide range of situations and uses that characterize language testing practice in the 21st century, and provides a basis for addressing the challenges these raise.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.